After some advice regarding Vimeo being used by a website.

[jmcdermott]

Hi fellow IT people.

 

I am currently having a discussion about a piece of software purchased by one of our Primary schools that relies on Vimeo for hosting. I am under the belief that Vimeo should not be used withing a school environment but am assured that this software is used in "1000s" of schools, can any one let me know if they use the software in question and how to got over the filtering issues please?

 

Software is Ruth Miskin Training from ruthmiskin.com.

 

There tech support suggested I white list 2650 individual urls to allow the site to work without un filtering Vimeo itself.

 

Many thanks and keep up the good work.

 

John

Edited June 21, 2024 by Dos_Box

[NegativeKillDeath]

Can they provide the urls in plain text and does your filtering solution allow bulk importing of urls by txt file?

[jmcdermott]

They do but it is a list of 2650 urls, which is a very excessive number of allowed urls which I fear will cause a significant slow down of the filter, are current list is about 200 addresses.

[3s-gtech]

We've had this with a site that chose to use Vimeo - they also internally hosted the videos for select customers when requested. We have a clause in our IT policies - if we can't get something to work within the bounds of our security policies we can reject it (10 Ticks was the reason for that one!)

[dhicks]

They do but it is a list of 2650 urls, which is a very excessive number of allowed urls which I fear will cause a significant slow down of the filter, are current list is about 200 addresses.

 

Might be worth testing - a couple of thousand records shouldn't be a huge number for a decent modern text string matching algorythm to handle. The tricky / fiddly / time-consuming part is most likely to be when they add new content and that list of URLs is out-of-date - do they send you updates on a regular basis, is there a sensible way to automate that list going in to your web filter?

[synaesthesia]

"Just because everyone does it, doesn't meant it's right" regarding their silly comment about 1000s of schools using their service. And indeed, I think it was HegartyMaths back in the day who used Vimeo to start with prior to their Sparx merger, and they were happy to provide a list of URLs for whitelisting. There would be no/neglibable performance hit, your filtering is already checking against tens of thousands of words for every hit anyway.

[Sylv3r]

I think Unifrog also host their video content on Vimeo - which we haven't allowed in our secondaries.

[drutt]

Bought something without consulting IT first?

 

[TwistedHelixis]

1000s of schools used Sparklebox back in the day, doesn't make it a good option.

[DGardiner]

no, the websites full of "art"

 

offers no controls that can be managed from the filter, or didnt last i checked so ^

[jmcdermott]

Did not consult IT, and did not try a trial, but apparently it is the most important software in the world and can not be lived without.

[DrCheese]

Did not consult IT, and did not try a trial, but apparently it is the most important software in the world and can not be lived without.

 

and is used exactly once after IT have spent ages getting it to work...

[sigma]

We have a similar thing. I manage it by having Vimeo as such blocked for pupils so they can’t just go there and watch any old thing, but create an overriding allow rule based on the referrer header of the site that embeds the videos. This only allows the Vimeo videos embedded on the site and to be viewed only embedded in the site. This means that when the site adds or removes videos I don’t have to keep changing my rules and it keeps the filtering setup overhead to a minimum - about half a dozen lines.

 

I do this for a site that embeds YouTube as well.

 

Shout if you want a hand and a pointer to some tools.